A Forum for Journalists--both Online and otherwise--that attended the PenplusbYtes-organised two day meeting on Training Journalists for ICT in April 2006. This space is to reunite that group with a view to forming GHAJICT, an association of Journalists in ICT

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Gannett retooling its news-gathering efforts

Gannett, the country's(USA) largest newspaper company, is making plans to roll out a nationwide initiative to gather and disseminate information across a multitude of media, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The McLean-based company has about 90 newspapers, including USA Today, the nation's largest daily paper. Like other newspaper companies, Gannett is losing readers and advertising revenue as folks turn to the Internet and other mediums to get their information.

Gannett executives are hoping to reverse that trend with their new initiative, dubbed the Information Center.

"The Information Center will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it," Gannett Chairman, President and CEO Craig Dubow wrote in a letter to employees. Company officials provided the letter to Washington Business Journal.

Gannett executives say the Information Center concept transforms the process for providing news and information. The newsroom evolves into a place that's focused on gathering the information people want using words, images and video and then distributes it across multiple platforms from newspapers to Web sites to other non-print entities.

Gannett's newspaper division, which has conducted a series of pilot programs to create and test the Information Center concept, organized the center around seven key information-gathering areas: digital, public service, community conversation, local, custom content, data and multimedia.

"The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future," Dubow wrote. "It will fulfill today's needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process."

To test the process, Gannett (NYSE: GCI) has implemented the Information Center on a full-scale pilot basis at three of its papers, and partially at other sites.

"What they found," Dubow wrote, "is remarkable: Breaking news on the Web and updating for the newspaper draws more people to both those media. Results include stronger newspapers, more popular Web sites and more opportunities to attract the customers advertisers want."

The European Commission says some mobile phone users are turning off their handsets when abroad because of "excessively high" roaming charges.

Its call came after a survey conducted for the Commission found 70% of Europeans want it to act to reduce the cost of cross-border mobile calls.

The commission first said in July that it intended to cap roaming charges.

Europe's mobile phone networks insist legislation is not needed as they are already reducing their roaming prices.

Four-times higher

Reaffirming its intention to bring in caps, the Commission said its latest survey also found that calls to a mobile in another country within the EU could be as much as four times higher than a call within one nation.

Commissioner Viviane Reding is leading the attack on roaming charges

European Union Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, who is leading the caps plan, said the current high prices were putting off people from using their phones while on holiday.

"Excessively high prices restrict mobile usage while abroad," she said.

"This hurts consumers, it hurts European industry and it hurts Europe."

The legislation to cap roaming charges is currently being debated by the European Parliament, and the Commission says it wants the new law adopted before the 2007 summer season.

However, mobile phone operators insist the legislation is not needed, and firms such as Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom have already announced plans to reduce their roaming charges.

According to the Commission, the European roaming market is worth 8.5bn euros ($11bn; £5.7bn) a year, or 5.7% of the sector's revenues.

The Commission estimates that its legislation will save European phone users 5bn euros a year.

Last in Athens, the UN hosted it's first "Internet Governance Forum," or IGF for short. It is a model for global governance. It is also a work in process.

The differences between the IGF and previous UN bodies are significant and several. I will focus on the few that seem most important.

The IGF is formally a "multi-stakeholder" body. That means the actors include not only government officials, but also businesses, NGOs of various types, academics, journalists and individuals. This appears to be pretty fundamental to the way the IGF operates, including equal participation and access to panels, workshops and social events.

Formally, the IGF was organized under the UN by Kofi Annan. The small Geneva based secretariat is run by Markus Kummer, a career diplomat from Switzerland. There is also a "multi-stakeholder" advisory board, which serves one year terms, now headed by Nitin Desai, an Indian national who is the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Adviser for Internet Governance. So far the rules for the IGF are very minimalist.

In a typical UN body, much of the focus on the events are to shape high-level declarations, statements, resolutions and other decisions, that are approved either by consensus or through more formal voting. People coming to Athens were surprised or in some cases disappointed to see very little emphasis on this type of activity, at least in this first meeting. Instead, the IGF has created a space for governments, interest groups and individuals to work together in much more bottom-up and unsupervised way.

The primary opportunity for norm setting at the IGF appeared to be through the formation of something called "dynamic coalitions" -- a term that was unfamiliar to everyone I talked to. Apparently IGF deliberately avoided the term "working groups," because that would imply that the groups were speaking for the entire IGF. These dynamic coalitions, on the other hand, do not claim to represent the views of everyone - only their own membership, or the parties that endorse specific proposals.

The IGF secretariat decided to allow these dynamic coalitions to self organize in Athens, around topics that were relevant to the various panels and workshops. In Athens, several were formed, each with a different mission and style.

The IGF approach was not an accident. The IGF was created by a much more conventional UN effort, the "World Summit on the Information Society," WSIS, that was concluded in Tunis in 2005. There were deep divisions at the WSIS on several topics, including those related to free expression, censorship, human rights, intellectual property rights, free software, funding for needed capacity building and infrastructure development in the poorest countries, and many other issues, including perhaps the most contentious issue - the debate over who should control the Internet root servers and other key technical standards and resources.

The WSIS could not reach consensus on many of these topics, but there was recognition that the topics were important. The IGF was created to continue the conversations, but with the understanding it would not have broad powers to set "hard" global norms.

What the IGF could do has been the subject of discussion and debate, much of it below the radar screen of the press and the wider public.

The United States government, which now controls the Internet root server/domain name system, is anxious to prevent the IGF from having too much power. So too are many large companies, fearing the IGF could introduce new regulations of Internet activities, including those relating to consumer protection, privacy and regulation of content.

Many developing countries, such as Brazil, have pushed for a continued debate over how the Internet root will be controlled, and many national governments, academics, corporate entities and NGOs are pushing to raise other issues that are directly or indirectly related to the Internet.

The IGF was created with a mandate to explore these issues, but it starts without much top down authority. What it does provide, however, is space where like-minded parties can work together to create "soft" norms, or agreements between each other to take action. These efforts, through the so-called IGF "dynamic coalitions," are very open and bottom up. Because the IGF itself is not ready to begin making global policy, from the top, it has created a structure that does not block conversations and norm setting - from the bottom.

The consequences of this may be profound. At other global trade fora, such the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the World Trade Organization (WTO), decisions and agendas are fairly tightly controlled, and it is very difficult to move a proposal, because it requires either a super majority or a consensus of governments. At the IGF, on the other hand, the bottom up norm setting can get started whenever there is even a small conspiracy to do something.

We have participated in the creation of two such dynamic coalitions - one on open standards for software and information technologies, and the other on Access to Knowledge (A2K) and free expression. Dynamic coalitions have been formed on the control of Internet root servers, privacy, and other issues.

The memberships of the dynamic coalitions created in Athens are diverse - including governments, businesses, academics and NGOs. The French government will be hosting a meeting of the Privacy coalition in Paris. The coalitions on open standards hope to have face to face meetings in three cities, and develop best practices models for government procurement of software, between now and next year's IGF meeting, which will be held in Rio.

It is quite early to see how these efforts play out, but it is interesting. Can we think of global governance as a process that is open, even to NGO and individuals, and not coercive at the global level? For the Internet, this is perhaps the right way to start.

The Vice President of the Ghana Journalists Association, GFA, Mr Affail Monney has stressed the need for media organizations in the country to provide their journalists with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support them in increasing their efficiency and introduction to modernity into their operations.

He said with the changing times, it was about time that individual media organizations put in greater efforts at going ICT to be abreast with evolving events to be better placed to inform, entertain and educate the public on pertinent issues that will bring about positive change in their lives.

Mr Monney said this on Friday at the closing ceremony of a training workshop for a cross section of Journalists in Accra. About 50 selected Journalists from both the private and state media in three batches were trained under the project funded by the Japanese Funds-in Trust (JFIT) in collaboration with UNESCO's International programme for Development of Communication (IPDC) and support by Africa On-Line and the GJA.

The Vice President said it is encouraging news to the GJA that the participants have strengthened their capacity in ICT, improved on their capacity and understanding of internet use, the use of simple and complex search engines for research, the use of computer for page planning, layout and design as well as improving on their skills in digital age journalism and on-line journalism. Mr Monney said with the excellent ICT facilities, the Association intends to source for funds from its associate partners to undertake further training for it members, adding, We will adopt more flexible schedules at any future training to give more members, especially from the private press to have more friendly and conducive training programme.

He appealed to the participants to consolidate the knowledge acquired by regularly practicing on their computers so as not to get rusty or forget what they have learnt and in that way it would go a long way in broadening the media's horizon in ICT.

Mr Ebenezer K. Ogyiri, Programme Officer Culture and Communication of the Ghana National Commission for UNESCO advised the GJA to put a management team to run an ICT centre for the benefit of its members. He advised members of the Association to patronize the ICT centre at the International Press Centre and to make frequent use of the facilities to update their skills in reportage. The General Secretary of the GJA, Mr Bright Blewu explained to the GNA that the general objectives of the project under UNESCO's IPDC, was to strengthen the human resource capacity of journalists in ICT. The participants who received certificates appealed to the Japanese government and UNESCO to assist them procure either computers or lab-top computers to facilitate their knowledge in ICT. They expressed profound gratitude to the organizers, lecturers and sponsors for initiating such a laudable training programme for journalists and asked for more of such workshops to make Ghanaian journalists compete with their counterparts from the rest of the world and to improve on their job descriptions.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Credibility. It is hard to define, hard to earn, and even harder to regain once it is lost.For decades, news organizations -- especially newspapers -- have struggled to understand why readers find the media less and less credible. Or why some news organizations, such as cable news networks, have a higher credibility rating than older and more established (and local) news outlets. It is a vexing problem.

The task grew even more complicated eight years ago when the Internet offered the public a whole new, interactive way to obtain news and information. A question that may plague us for the next several decades is, "How do the issues of credibility and reliability play out in the online news environment?"

Media consultant Martha Stone and I have been studying digital journalism credibility for the past year on behalf of the Online News Association. Our report, which was released Jan. 31, is based on more than 50 interviews with industry executives, dozens of case studies, several industry roundtables, and two research surveys. The ONA study, which was funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also outlines strategies that several sites have undertaken to be more open and more transparent with their readership.

We found that the public has largely accepted digital news as an important source of credible news. Thirteen percent of the online public saying that Internet news is their most trusted source of news.

However, the ONA survey also shows that most of the online public surveyed remains neutral on credibility issues surrounding online news.

This lack of strong opinion is where the online news media may have its greatest opportunity. It is a chance to move those neutral views to positive ground. Or, conversely, there is the real danger that the public will be come critical of some practices and become as critical of online news as it is of newspapers.

The acceptance of online news is good news for digital journalists. Although the older, traditional media has been losing the public's trust, online news seems to be enjoying a credibility honeymoon, according to a national survey of 1,000 online consumers and 1,500 media workers conducted for ONA.

Rather than vilifying digital news, the online public has largely accepted it as an important source of credible news. Journalists surveyed expected the public to be much more negative about the credibility of digital news. They also expressed more concerns about professional quality than the online public.

The survey also indicates there appears to be a division of opinion about the credibility of digital news between those who work for traditional media organizations -- newspapers, broadcasting -- and those who work for Web sites. And there is a difference of opinion about credibility between the media workers who took the survey and the online public. Some examples from the report:

Media workers were more likely to have made up their minds about credibility and were more likely to be critical than the online public was. Among the rankings produced by the survey's media respondents, there were five sources (local TV news, local radio stations, other news Web sites, local TV Web sites and local radio Web sites) about which more than 25 percent - and as many as 40 percent - say the source is not credible. By comparison, no more than 12 percent of the public says any particular news source is not credible.

When asked to agree or disagree with the statement: "Online news sites are my/consumers' most trusted sources for news," 13 percent of the online public agreed, 44 percent had no opinion, and 43 percent disagreed. Media respondents predicted that 79 percent of online readers would disagree with the statement.

The report's executive summary puts the gap in perception between media and public this way: ". (the) survey's findings should prompt journalists and the public alike to confront a critical issue: Is there something the media perceives or knows about the ethics and practices of online news organizations or operations that the public does not know? Or are traditional media just being resistant to online news?"

The report also examined the reasons consumers use news Web sites and the most important factors affecting story credibility. Some highlights include:

When it comes to credibility, online readers are more concerned about accuracy than timeliness. In a list of 11 story characteristics affecting credibility, online readers rank "story is up to date" fifth, after accuracy, completeness, fairness and trusted source.

Asked directly if the separation between advertising and editorial content matters to a news source's credibility, the public overwhelmingly (95.9 percent) says "Yes, it matters." But when ONA asked online readers to rank advertising-editorial independence as a variable affecting news credibility, it barely made the list (ninth of 11 attributes, ahead of audio/visual quality and entertainment value).

About 40 percent of the online public are confident they can discriminate between advertising and editorial content, with another 30 percent expressing neutrality or a lack of opinion on the issue. That confidence is positively correlated with a reader's general trust of online news, which increases in time spent online and with the number of times a reader has visited a particular online news site. Familiarity breeds confidence.

The issue of advertising and editorial separation has been a hot discussion topic among online and traditional journalists. The findings about the separation of advertising and editorial content should be reassuring to those site managers who are trying to find new ways of attracting revenue. However, it might be too early to relax about this finding, as poorly labeled content could have a negative affect in the long run.

In addition to the results of its two surveys, the ONA's Digital Journalism Credibility Study presents a broader discussion of the professional experiences and insights. Among the topics covered are:

Who is a journalist? This includes a discussion on journalistic training and experience.

What kinds of challenges to credibility have downsizing, reorganization and retrenchment posed?

What kinds of training or professional perspectives should media workers in online newsrooms be expected to have - practically and ideally? Technical issues have typically taken precedence over ethical concerns when it comes to newsroom training, but that may be changing in online newsrooms.

How are online newsrooms working through the challenges presented by the pressures to produce revenue? The report sites specific ways in which various news organizations are dealing with sponsored content and presents an in-depth discussion of advertising policies and processes.

How are online newsrooms handling the Web's two hallmark characteristics: immediacy and interactivity? While the push to get the story first remains very much a part of the online news industry culture, there's a clear recognition that getting it first is not as important as getting it right. Brand credibility is at stake.

The issue of digital journalism credibility is broad and deep. The ONA study is a first look at many of the issues journalists -- print, broadcast, online -- will need to address if we are to take advantage of this new medium that allows almost instant publishing, unparalleled depth of content, and unique interactivity with readers.

Just as developing online news medium continues to be an exciting challenge, so should the opportunity to secure and increase the medium's credibility with its readers.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Western Telesystems (WESTEL) Ghana Limited has been granted a licence by the National Communications Authority (NCA) to operate a mobile service.

This brings to five, the number of mobile telephony service providers in the country and the second state-owned company after Ghana Telecommunications Company (GhanaTelecom) to obtain a mobile service licence.

The acting Director-General of the NCA, Major John Tandoh (retd), on Tuesday, handed over the licence, which formally empowered the company to operate, to the acting Managing Director of WESTEL, Ms Ursula Owusu, at a brief signing ceremony in Accra.

WESTEL, which is already plagued with problems of meeting its targets, as far as, fixed line service is concerned, comes at a time the mobile sector has become more competitive.

Presently, Scancom Ghana Limited, operators of Areeba, holds the lion share of the market with up to 52.4 per cent of the total number of subscribers of 3,798,096 as of the first quarter of the year.

It is followed by Millicom Ghana Limited's tiGO GSM mobile service with 770,154 subscribers, GhanaTelecom's Onetouch with 711,119 and Kasapa Telecom, operators of Kasapa mobile service with 136,823 subscribers.

The company, which is in competition with GhanaTelecom fixed line service, lags behind in the competition, with only a little over 2,816 subscribers, constituting about one per cent of the total market share of 348,397 subscribers nationwide.

But Ms Owusu, after receiving the licence, indicated that WESTEL was not deterred by the competition in the market because, "we have studied all that we need to launch ourselves into the market and capture a substantial part of the market share with all the innovative products we have under our sleeves".

WESTEL obtained a licence to operate as the country's second fixed line service operator about seven years ago and has since not been able to meet its targets of rolling out up to 100,000 fixed lines to its subscribers over a period throughout the country.

In September 2005, 66.7 per cent stake in the company was sold to the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), which was then the minority shareholder in the business, by ACG Telesystems (Ghana) Limited, the then majority shareholder, following a multiparty discussion between the government of Ghana and all the stakeholders of the company. This makes GNPC, which is also owned by the state, the sole shareholder of WESTEL.

To recapitalise the ailing company as part of its privatisation process, GNPC subsequently invited bids from companies for the appointment of a Transaction Advisor to assist it select what has become a common palance as a "strategic investor" for the company.

According to Ms Owusu, the privatisation process was on-going and it was expected that the process would be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2007, after which the company would fully commence business to as she put it, "give the four a run for their money".

"The road to this day has not been easy and smooth and that alone challenges us to give Ghanaians what they deserve", she said optimistically.

Ms Owusu admitted that the company had faced a lot of challenges since the first day it was granted a licence to operate the fixed line service and noted that the new WESTEL was more than rejuvenated to roll-out more fixed line service, mobile service, as well as, high speed data services.

Asked about the source of funding for the company to undertake its ambitious roll-out programme, Ms Owusu said "we know what we are about but I will not tell you where the money is coming from".

She said the company was aware of the penalties should it fail, and stressed that competing with others, would had been motivate to deliver.

On the company's public payphones which were almost out of the system, she said it was a strategic decision by the management of the company to phase that service out because it was not profitable.

She said the company in its new focus was looking more into the future and was ready to put money where it would have return on investments.

Mr Tandoh congratulated the company for its fight to get the licence to operate as the fifth mobile phone service provider in the country.

He pledged the commitment of the NCA to ensure that WESTEL survived the competition